Bush’s approval rating at under 40 percent, nearly two-thirds of Americans no longer in favor of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the vice president’s chief of staff indicted, the House Majority Leader indicted, the Senate Majority Leader under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Harriett Miers fiasco, and now the Democrats shutting down the Senate? It all feels so deliciously appropriate and so painfully overdue. Are the Democrats finding their spines? Will Cheney be indicted? Will Bush be impeached?

Before succumbing to ecstasy over these dramatic events, which sometimes seem too good to be true, it behooves progressives to look deeper into the wormhole that the criminal empire, the United States government, has become. Indeed, the next few months will be messy, and Bush & Co. are irreversibly in demise, but the hope these events might instill in us must be tempered by historical and political perspective.

Make no mistake, this is Bush’s “Watergate Burglary,” and it is so seductively enticing to believe that the American people are growing weary of the neocons and that somehow, the pendulum of history is swinging in the direction of democracy. What we must remember, however, is that the American people do not run the country—nor do presidents.

What we are witnessing is the evisceration of the Bush administration by none other than individuals employed by and working closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. Libby was indicted, as Karl Rove may well be in the coming weeks, for participating in the leaking of the identity of a covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame—a crime which George Bush, Sr., once called treason.
Knowing exactly who/what the CIA is and has been since its creation in 1947 might shed some light on current events. The agency was created at the beginning of the Cold War under President Truman by Clark Clifford, a Wall Street banker and lawyer. His closest confidante and assistant was Allen Dulles, an attorney with Sullivan & Cromwell, which was then and still is, a prominent Wall St. law firm. It was about this same time that Dulles pulled the necessary strings to bring hundreds of former Nazis into the United States to work for the CIA in the agency’s intelligence operations against the Soviet Union. (CIA Admits Long Relationship With WWII German Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, Maria Alvarez, The New York Post, September 24, 2000 and Operation Paperclip Casefile)

During the Vietnam War in the 1970s, the agency conducted a secret war in Laos financed by extensive and sophisticated heroin trafficking. The details of this operation are now extremely well-documented and explain how it was that Congress was both unaware of the war and unwilling to appropriate any funds for it, even if it had been aware. Alfred McCoy, professor of Southeast Asian History, University of Wisconsin, has written extensively of these events in his book The Politics Of Heroin. Additional verification the CIA’s drug trafficking operations in Laos may also be read at Dark Alliance.

During the illegal Contra War of the 1980s, the CIA, with the assistance of Oliver North, helped finance that war by selling arms to Iran and trafficking crack-cocaine throughout South Central Los Angeles. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist, Gary Webb, a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, wrote an exhaustive series on the CIA and South Central drug dealing, which was later incorporated into a riveting book, Dark Alliance. Following an investigation, the agency's inspector general, in a 1998 report, found that the CIA was engaged in drug trafficking activities during the Contra War. The next logical question would then be: Is the agency still involved in drug trafficking in the twenty-first century? I believe that it is.

While some Americans are aware of the CIA’s history of drug dealing, few are aware of how the agency appropriates its drug profits. Many people believe it uses its resources to finance wars, assassinations, and endless covert operations. While this is true, the CIA has an even more urgent “budgetary line item.” That is to simply launder its drug profits through the American stock market, killing two birds with one stone: Washing the money and at the same time, pouring massive amounts of liquid cash (translation: cheap money) into the economy. The foremost authorities on this issue are Catherine Austin Fitts, former Undersecretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bush I, and Mike Ruppert, former L.A.P.D. narcotics investigator whom the CIA attempted to recruit to assist in its drug-trafficking operations in the 1970s and 80s.

Extensive information and documentation on this issue can be found at both Fitts’ and Ruppert’s websites.

When one analyzes the issue of CIA and drug trafficking in depth, it becomes painfully obvious that a revolving door exists between the agency and Wall Street. A disproportionate number of inspectors general and directors have come on board the agency from Wall Street or have returned to high-level positions in the stock market upon leaving the CIA. Together, the CIA and the highest levels of corporate capitalism call the shots in American domestic and foreign policy.

Many individuals, including myself, have researched the CIA’s history and covert activities since its creation. Some of its illegal, inhumane, and egregious activities include:

* Collaboration with former Nazi war criminals

* Large scale drug trafficking operations on several continents and within the U.S.

* Criminal experiments with LSD and human mind control during the 1960s and 70s.

* Covert operations resulting in orchestrated revolutions and overthrow of governments around the world to serve the interests of the United States

* Extensive involvement in assassinations internationally and within the United States, including the assassination of John F. Kennedy

* The creation of a black budget during the Reagan Administration which absolved the CIA of accountability for its assets or expenditures. (George [H.W.] Bush, The Unauthorized Biography)

* Human rights violations and torture, including the recent disclosure of the maintenance of a covert prison system around the world where terrorist suspects are incarcerated and probably tortured.

It should be emphasized that not all individuals employed by the CIA are evil executioners. However, the policies and covert activities of the agency for over five decades have frequently been abhorrent in their implementation and outcome. As the principal intelligence agency of the most powerful nation on earth, the agency’s activities are more often than not, reprehensible, yet at the same time, its persona and modus operandi are highly professional. It seeks world domination, but not with fangs dripping with blood as do the neconservative thugs of the current Bush administration. Personally, I like to think of the CIA’s approach as a “kinder, gentler fascism.”

Few Americans understand the scope or financial underpinnings of the CIA or the fact that it owns hundreds of proprietary companies and could very well have an annual budget that dwarfs the budget of the United States government itself by comparison. It is, as many CIA researchers have theorized, a government within a government. That said, we must ask: What happens to any individual or group of individuals who might attempt to challenge or supercede “the company,” as its employees fondly refer to it? Indeed, many high-ranking CIA officials backed the current Bush administration at its inception. Others did not.

Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA officer working “officially” for Brewster, Jennings & Associates, a well-established CIA proprietary company linked for many years with ARAMCO. The British Guardian reported in April, 2002 that ARAMCO constitutes 12 percent of the world’s total oil production. It’s the largest oil group in the world, a state-owned Saudi company in partnership with four major U.S. oil companies. ARAMCO operates, manages, and maintains virtually all Saudi oil fields or 25 percent of all the oil on the planet. Almost the entire Bush administration has an interest in ARAMCO. Given that the Saudis have been less than truthful in recent years regarding the actual amount of oil they are producing, and given America’s heavy reliance on Saudi petroleum, from the point of view of the CIA, the Plame operation was invaluable, and having it shattered by means of personal vengeance by someone inside the White House was the final straw for the agency. Remember that the CIA director’s job is to advise the president on scientific data on foreign resources. The outing of Plame made this impossible, hence threatening national security.

Journalists Wayne Madsen and Mike Ruppert conclude in the analysis of the Plame leak that: “The Bush administration has proved itself to be an insular group of inept, dishonest, and dangerous CEOs of the corporation known as America. They have become very bad for business and the board of directors is now taking action.”

Bush & Co. have gotten in the way and essentially shot themselves in the foot and crossed swords with the agency which wanted a “kinder, gentler,” less belligerent, less dramatic fascism. Someone else did that 35 years ago. His name was Richard Nixon, and the agency brought him down.

The real question is: Who runs America? Who runs the world? Certainly presidents don’t, nor do the American people. A critical analysis of U.S. history since the end of the Civil War strongly suggests that while we may not know the identities of all of the players, we do know that they are essentially the top 1 percent of the socio-economic milieu of the country. Names like “Bush” come to mind, but other names like “Rockefeller” seem quaint and lessrelevant — except when we consider that 1) the Rockefellers brought the Bush family to power even before both were financing Hitler, and 2) one of the first officials in 2003 to request an FBI investigation of the forged documents used to justify the invasion of Iraq was none other than a distinguished Senator from West Virginia named Rockefeller. Jay Rockefeller renewed his rumblings immediately after the Libby indictment, and one can only imagine that this is sending shivers up the spines of some White House occupants.

Why does this matter? Because what we may well be seeing is not “democracy in action” but a coup d'état by the ruling elite to reclaim their preferred world domination scenario—one that frequently masquerades as “liberal,” “progressive,” or “humanitarian.” At I write this article, we are seeing new documents released by the New York Times confirming that critical intelligence was falsified as a pretext for the Vietnam War. Remember that in that war, it was not a group of rabid, conservative militarists who led the nation into “the fog of war” but an Eastern liberal establishment of lifelong Democrats. (See Beyond Bush II)

I watch the meltdown of the current regime with as much glee as any other progressive, but I also fear that in our eagerness to witness Watergate II, we will naively embrace the next globalist Pied Piper (Piper-ess?) who wants to convince us that two political parties and legitimate elections actually exist in America, that we can continue to consume energy as if there were no tomorrow, and who will kindly, gently preserve a policy of endless war for the last remaining drops of oil on earth. Will we settle for this because “it’s the only system we have,” or will be demand the total meltdown, not only of Bush & Co., but the one-party criminal empire that is obliterating the ecosystems and the future of the human race?